How to
Turn Your Telephone Into a
More Effective Marketing Tool with
These Three Little-Known Secrets
by Adam Urbanski,
The Marketing Mentor
One of the most effective marketing tools ever invented is sitting on your
desk right now. It’s your TELEPHONE! While many professionals waste time
cold calling strangers, some marketing savvy pros are using phone in unique ways
to quietly attract more new clients, increase customer loyalty, generate loads
of referrals and boost sales and profits - all while saving time and money.
Would you like to know how?
Telephone – like other tools – can
be used in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, most people settle on just one
phone-based marketing activity – cold calling.
I know there are training programs
out there teaching how to fall in love with cold calling. Perhaps you enjoy
interrupting people, trying to speak as fast as you can to squeeze in your
entire sales pitch before they hang up on you. Frankly, I prefer to chew on
nails for a week than to make one cold call. But hey – that’s just me. Besides,
the best cold call is when a prospect calls you – but that’s a subject
for another article. So
here are my top three tips for using phone-marketing effectively.
Top Tip #1 - Call existing
clients or prospects.
Remember the saying “don’t preach
to the choir”? It’s wrong! You should only preach to the choir!
Instead of bothering strangers,
connect with your existing customers or people who have indicated interest in
your services or products.
Top Tip #2 - Have a specific
reason to call.
Make your message relevant to the person on the receiving end. If you are
not sure what you have to offer that’s valuable to your clients and could be
shared by phone, you should be looking for a job… But if you insist on running
your own business here are a few tips:
- Call to say thank you.
Yep, that simple! I just spoke to an internet marketer who makes it a point to
call all new online customers within one day. With a bit of clever technology he
often makes a live, personal call to the new clients within minutes of them
placing an order. Can you imagine how blown away his customers are?
- Educate customers how to
better use your product or service. If you help them get the most out of working
with you, they will be more successful and more likely to recommend you to
others.
- Introduce them to a new
resource you found helpful. By the way, could you see an opportunity for
making this recommendation a strategic alliance?
- Invite customers and
prospects to a special event and tell them to bring a friend or business
associate. It doesn’t even have to be your event. Are you planning on going to a
workshop with a great speaker? Why not bring along a few clients and prospects?
- Make current customers
aware of exclusive offers available only to them. Hey, they pay your bills,
why not put something special for them once in a while.
- Remind them about attending
an event. Yep, sometimes inviting people is not enough. So call to refresh
their memory – they will thank you for it.
- Use your call in
conjunction with other marketing tools to build anticipation. For example
you could make a call to announce that a special mailer will be arriving in the
mail-box and email-box thus increasing your chances of your written marketing
message actually being noticed…
I’m sure you are now asking:
“couldn’t I just use email to do all of that”? You certainly could, but… If
you relay on email alone you lose a very person aspect of using your voice.
Plus, with a click of a button – puff – and your email is gone! Your call has a
higher chance of making it through.
Which brings me to my last point…
Top Tip #3 - Use technology to
automate your calls.
Yes, I’m talking about pre-recorded messages – like the ones that interrupt your
dinner. Well, actually not quite like that… Before you rush to judgment that
this stuff doesn’t work, let me explain a couple of reasons why it does work.
Unlike those annoying calls from
strangers pitching new credit cards or better mortgage rates I’m suggesting
to leave messages for people you have already done business with in the past or
who specifically requested you send them more information. That’s a big
difference! The
technology today makes it possible for the call to disconnect if a live person
answers so you don’t alienate people by making them talk to a computer!
Finally, distributing a
pre-recorded message makes it possible to contact hundreds and thousands of
people with just a fraction of the time it would take to make personal
calls. Which saves you time and money.
Let’s just say that you are
billing a $100 per hour of your time. Assuming that each call could take about a
minute (and that’s a fast call!) you could make about 60 calls per hour. Your
cost is $1.66 per call! And you will get more and more tired and less and less
energetic with every call – decreasing the quality of your message.
As an alternative an automated
phone broadcast can cost you about 14 cents per minute. And every message is
your BEST MESSAGE! For
example, sending a 30 second message to 2000 customers would cost you $140.
(half a minute x $0.14 per minute x 2000 customers). What a bargain! It’s fast,
it’s cheap and it gets through! By the way – imagine personally leaving 2000
messages… That would take you over 33 hours... Good luck trying!
Bottom line to this long winded
explanation is this: making THE RIGHT TYPE OF CALL THE RIGHT WAY in
conjunction with modern technology and other marketing tools can make a huge
difference in your business.
FREE BONUS GIFT:
Want to hear four sample marketing recordings and read my comments what makes
them effective?
Listen to them here…
(c) 2004 Adam M. Urbanski
NOTE: Are
you looking for fresh content for your ezine or web site? Feel free to reprint
this article as long as it's kept intact and unaltered (including the “about the
author” info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint to
adam@themarketingmentors.com
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